Hacking the real world.
Reality
I once had a
friend that had a stereo arch. That is, a stereo shaped like an arch, with the
electronics housed at the keystone. This stereo had a remote control, a remote
control which had disappearing buttons. I would use it to listen to stuff if I
was reading in the dining room and occasionally, with no discernable frequency,
a couple of the buttons would disappear. I couldn’t work out what was going on,
but when I was sharing a joint with this friend on his back doorstep, I would
ponder whether I could be jumping back and forth between dimensions where the
only discernable difference was that this remote control was slightly
different.
Could this
be the same for everyone, could reality not be as fixed as we have always
thought, like Einstein proved is true of time, but we drift through it as on a
gentle current, things imperceptibly changing of such a low level that most of
the time we don’t even notice? Maybe a girl born Mai in China is now born Mia,
or there is a slightly different taste to a brand of cola you don’t drink. And
even when something like a changing remote control design or a fact you know to
be incontrovertible being proven to be wrong comes along, your reality
compensating brain does it job and rationalises what it sees. It is a brain
function that Derren Brown exploits in his act all the time. What, I wondered,
if we were all adrift in a reality sea, reality being a dimension, like space
and time, each living in a separate world, each wondering why anyone would want
to live the way they do. In a Christian’s world, God absolutely exists, it is
obvious, why hasn’t everyone given themselves to Jesus? Inversely, for an
Atheist there is absolutely no god. Likewise, to the militant Christian,
abortion and contraception and homosexuality are immoral practices which must
be stamped out, because in their reality it would not seem anything unusual to
regard personal freedoms as irrelevant and counter to God’s will. By the same
token, it would explain why a child molester could serially behave in that
manner despite the obvious moral objections. The mentally ill could also be
regarded as persons very far from the societal mean, but we have got very good
at detecting them. It would explain a lot of things as a matter of fact.
Then one day
I was reading at the dining table, fiddling with the remote in my left hand
when I felt it split. I looked up to discover the back had come off. The remote
was reversible! One side had a remote for the radio, the other side was for the
CD, which slid into its case. In between visits, my mate had been using the
radio or the CD player and changed the remote as required.
So I had a
smoke and wondered, why haven’t I noticed that before? Was the solution so obvious
or did I drift into a third reality, a reality my brain sought out to
rationalise the disparity between the first two? Had the remote in fact started
out as two remotes in separate realities, before I had drifted on a channel
between the two, resolving into a rather elegant solution? And does it matter?
Real or merely philosophical, this is a good model of the world in which we
live. People believe in gods, people believe in Barrack Obama, or think Robbie
Williams has talent or that Gladiator is the greatest movie ever made, or that
Bob Dylan can sing.
And as
people believe in things, they also disbelieve, disbelieve in higher powers, in
the Moon landings, or that Diana’s crash was an accident, or that Peter
Serafinowicz was the voice of Darth Maul. There is no fixed reality, because
reality is only a matter of our perception of it. If we decide once again that
to hang, draw and quarter prisoners is the way to go then that will be the
norm. Global warming only becomes a reality if enough people believe, otherwise
it is nothing more than a couple of words strung together. Human individuality
has progressed at too quick a pace in recent history for us to stop and take
account of it all, we still cling to monorealisms, where there is but one God
that has certain rules about what may and may not been done with one very happy
ending for those who follow the rules and a hellishly definitive ending for
those who disobey.
My stories,
my philosophy looks to establish that we all generate our own localised
reality, all sitting spatially and temporally next to each other, all vying for
domination, which is why we feel the need to invent cyber space and the
information superhighway in which to house all these disparate ideologies. We
don’t get anywhere because we have yet to begin to try and make all the ideas
interact, to find common ground with others, even if only on one issue. We
could easily manipulate society to meet all expectations by adding new strata
to the visible world, strata which may for instance, sometime in the future,
closet away fascists in their own little bits of heaven. Like sending the BNP or
EDL to the Isle of Man and telling them there was a virus which wiped out
humanity, leaving only them alive. That would suit them.
Yet these
realities, these thoughts, they push together, tensing space. And if enough of
them push together, as education increases, as the superhighway establishes more
and more connections, as mass media ideas like those of Fox and Disney and
Tesco and Obama and Cheney and Simon Cowell and fair-trade, as well as myriad others, these squash together until a
rift forms and very much like a hole in a pressurised airplane cabin, anyone
who isn’t anchored to the plane gets sucked out. These ideas fascinate me,
which is why I write about them. Who knows what reality really is. Maybe one
day we’ll work it out. But probably not.
Get it done.
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